


And We Will Come Home

by missmungoe



Series: Stay the Course [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, We Were Made to Last AU, in which the Red-Hair Pirates crash Makino's wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-15 21:40:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13622187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmungoe/pseuds/missmungoe
Summary: She's getting married today, but it's far from a happy occasion. So it's a good thing he has a penchant for barging into her life when she least expects it.





	And We Will Come Home

**Author's Note:**

> This is a happy AU of [We Were Made to Last](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12258777), affectionately nicknamed "The Unspeakable 30 Years Fic", in which I put them through so much crap, Charybdis seems kind in comparison. It doesn't require reading the whole thing to understand this fic, but the first two scenes might be useful to get an idea of the background. The whole "how they got together in the first place" bit is covered in [Siren's Call](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6428275), which remains the baseline of all of my fics for them.
> 
> Oh, and silverscream? This is all your fault.

“Married?”

Ben meets his gaze without flinching, but there’s something in his eyes that belies his ever-level temperament, something almost urgent, and the reason for which is revealed a second later, when he says, evenly but for the sharp note interlacing the syllables, “Tomorrow.”

The word strikes him like a slap—was meant to, Shanks thinks; Ben doesn't mince his words, however cruel the truth, but he wasn't prepared for the ruthless honesty, feeling it bearing down on him now.

It feels like he’s going to be sick.

“She thinks you’re dead,” Ben points out, before Shanks can muster the voice to respond, as though knowing where his thoughts have gone without being told, and even implied, the suggestion is clear—that it wouldn't be this way, if she knew otherwise. And it’s only further emphasised when Ben says, voice too hard to be sympathetic, “You should have told her sooner.”

It’s not often Ben calls him out on his bad decisions, knowing it redundant to point out things Shanks already knows, but this time his judgement is offered without mercy. But Ben doesn’t tell him to call her, or assure him that if he does, she’ll change her mind, because Ben has no way of knowing what she’d do any more than Shanks, but the implication in his words remains firm—the fact that he should try, either way. That he owes Makino that much.

Part of him thinks he should leave her be, that he shouldn’t interfere. She has her life, one he hasn’t been part of for fourteen years, and he has no right to barge in, to claim his due. There’s nothing for him _to_ claim, least of all now that she’s marrying someone else. She isn’t his—hasn’t been that for over a decade, even as he thinks, foolishly hopeful, that she would have contested that notion, and fiercely. And even as he considers the facts before him, the unavoidable truth of her impending marriage, there are others he can’t ignore—the fact that there's likely a reason she didn’t marry earlier, that she’s only doing it now. The fact that she thinks he’s dead, and that he’s not coming back.

He doesn’t have time for indecision, and so he doesn’t spend any more wondering, or doubting. His choice is easy; hers will be the difficult one, and whatever state his heart will be in once she’s made it, he needs to let her. He owes her this. He owes her _everything_.

“Get me the Den Den Mushi,” Shanks says, and is glad when all Ben does is rise from his chair to comply, although he hadn’t expected resistance. And he doesn’t know what to say to her, after so many years—fourteen since he last heard her voice, and he can’t remember the sound of it, or even imagine what hearing it again will do to him.

It’s not the reunion he would have wished for. He’d meant to surprise her, to ask for her forgiveness in person, not over the phone, but the surprise had been his, and he doesn’t have time to wait to ask her forgiveness. He’s waited long enough—has made her wait, and longer than anyone should have to, and it’s his own fault, Shanks knows, but all he can do now is try to fix it.

But she doesn’t pick up. It keeps ringing, the Den Den Mushi staring back at him blankly, no connection made to the other end of the line, and the desperation that grips him is so great he nearly throws the snail across his cabin.

And then it’s panic he feels, realising that even knowing he’s running out of time might make no difference—that he’ll be too late, although what he even intents to do remains beyond him. Rushing in to stop her wedding sounds dramatic even for his standards—like something right out of one of her favourite novels, and if the situation hadn’t been what it is, Shanks might have found some measure of humour at the thought—but he doesn’t know what else he can do.

“Why isn’t she picking up?” he asks, and even if he knows the question is ridiculous, because Ben is always sure, “Are you sure this is the right number?”

Ben doesn’t point out the redundancy of the question, only nods. “She might be busy,” he says instead, and the suggestion lands like another blow—the implication of what she’s doing, that she’s busy with her upcoming wedding, the way any bride would be.

Shanks thinks he really might be sick this time.

“What do you want to do?” Ben asks then, cutting right to the chase, although it’s not so much a question asked out of genuine curiosity as it is a reminder of the only option that’s left to him, if he means to do anything at all.

They’re close. A day’s voyage to Dawn, if they’re quick. And they’ll have to be quick if they mean to reach her in time.

He doesn’t have time to think.

“Notify the helmsman,” Shanks tells him, rising from his bunk. “We’re setting course for Fuschia.”

“Do you have a plan for what you’ll do once you get there?” Ben asks, because Ben always plans—calculates trajectories and outcomes and considers different alternatives. Shanks acts on his gut; he’s not short-sighted, but a lack of a plan was what landed him in this predicament, and he’s not about to barge into her life this time without knowing what he intends to do once he gets there.

Well. He still intends to barge in, but he’s not about to take her acceptance for granted, even if it kills him to even consider the alternative that she might turn him down. That she might look at him, not as she had once, with that bottomless affection, but with regret (because she would regret it, he knows; _she_ would regret that she couldn’t love him like she had, that she couldn't choose him), another man at her side, the one who’ll be her husband, and say with that heartbreaking sincerity— _I’m sorry, Shanks. I’ve made my choice._

“I’ll ask her,” he says, feeling suddenly emboldened, remembering the girl who’d looked at him from across the counter of her bar and who'd told him, bold as anything, _ask me again._

“What?” Ben asks, out of necessity or curiosity this time, Shanks doesn’t know, but the answer comes to him without thinking, selfish as it is, but he doesn’t care, because he hasn’t lost her yet, and as long as that remains true he has no intention of bowing out.

“To choose me instead.”

 

—

 

She’s getting married today.

She hasn’t slept a wink, restless at the prospect of what awaits her, and it’s not with joy that she greets her wedding day, hours earlier than she needs to, with her bar closed and when all that’s required of her is to get ready. All her things are packed, a new house awaiting her, along with her new life. And she's never owned much beside her books, her small worldly treasures, but her room feels empty without them; her heart, too, although it's been that way for months, and no amount of material things could ever fill that void, however much she'd loved them.

(she doesn't think about the boxes she's stored away—she couldn't bear to bring them with her, to have that reminder of him there, staring back at her from tenderly wrinkled spines, from the dog-eared pages within and his handwriting, the faded pencil scratches of him in the margins of her life)

She lies awake in the soft dark, feeling her heart, prodding at it with memories that hurt, if only to assure herself it's still here. It's a crooked healing with ugly scars, even as the skin above is smooth and unblemished. It's not suited for giving away, but then Makino doubts she could, even if it hadn't been so broken.

The Den Den Mushi on her nightstand sleeps, undisturbed by her loud, hurting heart. There are no phone calls, and Makino thinks she’s glad. There’d been one the day before, but the last time someone had called her, it had been Sengoku with news about Garp, and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to pick up, fearing who it might be this time—Ben, the call a long time in coming, or someone else from the crew, to finally offer their condolences. And she couldn’t bear the thought of breaking the news of her upcoming marriage; it feels like a betrayal, although of whom, she doesn’t rightly know.

They would have supported her decision. They would want her _happy_ , Makino knows, and that was the hardest realisation, the one that had really kept her from picking up. She thinks she’d rather have them disagreeing—to tell her not to go through with it, to come away with them instead.

She wonders idly if she would have said _yes_ , if they’d asked her. Even with their captain gone—even if there's nothing for her beyond the East Blue but the open sea and a ship that would never be home, not without him on it—she wonders if she would have accepted.

But even without Shanks, it would be more than Fuschia, and more than she has now—would be more than her marriage, and the future it promised—and she’d take anything, Makino thinks. And so she spends the morning waiting for a call, curled up under the sheets in her empty bedroom, her eyes fixed on the Den Den Mushi. She fairly begs it to ring, and for someone to tell her _wait_ , and _we’re coming_ , and _come with us._

But there is no call, and the day of her wedding dawns without compromise, bright and sunny and wrong.

She takes her time getting ready—not to savour the hours, or the little indulgences of a new bride, but because it takes effort willing her body into moving, into dressing and brushing out her hair. She has no appetite to eat, a recurring pattern over the past few months, and she thinks she might have mustered some regret at the fact, if she could have made herself feel anything at all.

Her fiancé’s sisters arrive to help, when the sun has risen, summer-bright and fairly dripping with heat, filling up her bedroom to the brim. They giggle at her tardiness, no doubt thinking it’s nervousness that makes her idle, that makes her hand shake around the comb snagged in her hair, and though they’re partly right, they don’t know about the crippling numbness that had followed her out of bed; that makes her limbs heavy and leaves her thoughts blank.

Makino listens to them talking around her, hearing their voices but not what they’re saying. She only vaguely perceives the hands tightening the laces of her bodice, cinching it too tight for comfort, or the comb plucked from her slack fingers to untangle the last of the sleepy knots in her hair, brushing it out with smooth strokes until it’s hanging, soft and heavy down her back. When they’re done, they braid it—pin it close to her skull until her head aches from the pressure, and the weight of the veil fastened to her nape. It shimmers in the sunlight, sheer as mist, but she feels the way it drags her head down, the wispy fabric heavy as an anchor, the ship’s rope wound about her neck.

Satisfied with their handiwork, they leave her to finish the last of the preparations, the bat-wing doors swinging shut behind their retreating voices in the bar below, but Makino barely registers their departure, watching herself in the mirror, gaze blank.

The result of their efforts is lovely, although it's a foreign kind of loveliness—nothing like she should be, or that she’s heard new brides should be like, so deliriously happy they can barely manage a single, coherent thought.

She isn’t deliriously happy—isn’t even _happy_ , not yet, no matter how lovely she looks. It doesn’t look right, as though she’s put on someone else’s skin, even as it’s still her face, is still her hair pinned back, and her eyes, the thick frame of her lashes kohl-lined, and her lips rosied. The dress is pretty, but constricting; a little too tight around her chest, the shape of it stifling and the capped sleeves stiff around her shoulders.

None of it feels like her, but then Makino doesn’t know what she’s supposed to feel like. She doesn’t recognise herself anymore.

And dressed and with less than an hour left to herself, the numbness yields to something else, watching her reflection in the mirror, the exposed skin of her collar and the rise of her breasts, the snug fit of the bodice, and she realises—and with something that is anything but detachment, the reaction almost visceral—that, like the hands that had tightened the laces hadn't been her own, there'll be different hands than hers unlacing them, freeing her, although considering it (unfamiliar hands and unfamiliar touches, baring her whole), it doesn't feel like freedom, however much she chose it for herself.

She tries not to think about her wedding night. They’ve only ever kissed—she’s never initiated anything further, or desired anything more. The man she’s marrying is old-fashioned, and he’s let her be, happy to take things slow, to abide by age-old traditions and wait.

Part of her wonders if he expects her to have saved herself for marriage. Probably not—even unmarried, she’s over thirty years old, and however old-fashioned or tender his sensibilities, he’d had to have found the prospect unlikely. But they’ve never broached the subject of old lovers; he’s never asked, although she’s often wondered if he’d heard the story, of the pirate who'd loved her, and left her. She can’t understand how he could have missed it, common knowledge as it is, but he hasn't lived in Fuschia long and it’s a strange little town that she calls hers, and perhaps it’s for her sake they’ve kept from speaking it, unwilling to invoke a memory that’ll bring her nothing but heartache.

And so maybe he thinks she’s never had anyone else—maybe he likes the thought of her like that, pure and untouched. And if he does, then let him think her some chaste, virgin spinster. Makino can’t bring herself to share that part of her past. Not with him. Not Shanks, and everything he’d been.

But even hoarding her memories, the small defiance gives her little courage, and she can’t stop thinking about it—of what she’ll eventually have to face. She’s never been intimate with anyone else, and grown woman or not, it _terrifies_ her, having to face it now.

She finds reprieve downstairs, huddled behind the bar, obscured by the gentle shadows and the quiet of her empty establishment, neither passing judgment. She’s rumpling her dress, her veil caught beneath her where she sits, but she can’t be bothered with either.

And it’s in no way an accidental choice, her hiding place. The refuge she’s sought, seeking the past for comfort with the future that awaits her.

She doesn't think about her wedding night. Instead she thinks about the first time she’d given herself so thoroughly, her back to the floorboards and Shanks’ weight pinning her down, along with his laughter. It had hurt, and it had been wonderful, and she can barely breathe, remembering it now—the way he’d used to touch her, to kiss her, so deeply she’d never wanted to resurface. She remembers how he’d laugh, that deep rumble of satisfaction, and how he’d always sought to make her blush, to tease stuttering pleas into outright demands, without success.

And she remembers how he had been under her touches—how she’d seize the laughter in his chest with a single brush of her fingers, and how he’d sink, heavy against her, into her, yielding all of himself to her keeping. The sigh that would leave him, soft with a marvelling laugh (all his sounds were wrought from laughter; she'd never known anyone who laughed so much, so easily), his body spent, strong limbs slack around her where he’d cradle her close, mouthing a kiss to the hollow of her breastbone like an offering, the afterglow of his climax having left him smiling, and wider than anything else would. She’d loved putting that smile on his face.

She can’t imagine ever loving someone else like that.

She drinks—for courage, maybe, or just to forget. It doesn’t matter which it is; it helps. It’s even a little defiant, Makino thinks, rooting out a bottle from her bottom cupboard, fingers shaking around the neck, fumbling the cork, and she almost spills it on her dress. She drinks until her throat burns, until she’s coughing from it, until it feels like she’s drowning but she doesn’t stop, can’t stop, because if she stops she’ll think; she’ll remember how he’d kiss her, how he’d loved her, and if she does that she won’t make it through today.

Hands cover hers then, crooked bones like gnarled roots, tugging the bottle away, and, “Girl,” Suzume snaps, having materialised at her side without her notice. Her head is buzzing, but it’s not a pleasant feeling, although maybe that's for the best, not invoking the man who'd taught her to drink, to savour taste and pleasure both. She doesn't want to savour anything.

The bottle disappears, and one of those gnarled hands grips her chin without kindness. She blinks her eyes open with effort, to focus on the face peering into hers, hard features like a cragged reef. “You’ll be of no use to anyone if you can’t walk down the godsdamned aisle.”

 _Good_ , Makino wants to say, but doesn’t, although from the look she gets, it hasn’t slipped the old woman’s notice.

“You know you don’t have to do this,” Suzume says then, the words gruff, but the reproach doesn’t succeed in being as cutting as it wants to be. “It ain’t too late to turn back.”

The sound that leaves her is too bitter to be a laugh. “So I should just spend my life alone?”

Suzume doesn’t answer; doesn’t say that it might just be for the best. She’s considered it, of course, but the thought is even worse than what awaits her today—the prospect of a future without anyone in it. And she likes her privacy and her quiet, but the world has been _too quiet_ since he’d left it, and she can’t bear it anymore, the thought of enduring that quiet for the rest of her life, all alone. Makino doesn’t think she’d survive it.

“He’s gone,” she says, the words small, roughed with drink and unshed tears, and she doesn’t care that her voice breaks. “He’s not coming back.” And she needs to tell herself this—needs to keep repeating it, to make herself understand, because if she doesn’t she might just hold out hope. She’ll spend the rest of her life waiting, and what kind of life is that?

“You want to spend it with this guy instead?” Suzume asks, and Makino realises belatedly she’d asked the question out loud.

 _No_ , she thinks, but what she says is, “He’s kind. He’ll be a good husband.” She doesn’t say _he’ll be a good father_ , because she can’t think about that right now. If she thinks about that, she’ll think about whose children she’d rather have—she’ll think about how _he_ would have been a good father, but that she’ll never have the chance to know just how good—and if she starts down that path, she’ll never make herself walk down that aisle, however kind her husband-to-be.

Suzume’s expression hasn’t budged, severe brows furrowed above those crow-black eyes, and Makino knows she already has her answer, even before she asks, “Is that enough for you?”

“No,” she says, this time. Acceptance, even as it will never be that, and even if all she’s doing is shying away from the truth. The husband she’d rather have, and the wedding that should be different—the marriage that will never be what she wants, and the children that will never be his. “But it’s what I have.”

Suzume says nothing to that, although she couldn’t have fronted her disapproval more if she’d shouted it, but even disagreeing, she holds out her hand to help her up.

Makino stares at it, the crooked fingers and the weathered skin (will she still be his wife once hers look like that? will she want to be?), before accepting, drawing some strength from the unyielding grip around her own, so tight it hurts. And she doesn’t pretend that it’s not the most difficult thing she’s ever done, summoning the will to stand, to leave the private shadows behind the bar, and the memories there.

The walk to the chapel is made in silence. Her shoes are uncomfortable, and the bodice of her dress too tight, making it hard to breathe, although there might be more than one reason for that, Makino concedes, even as she shies away from the thought when it tries to find her. Instead she focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping her head up and her back straight.

She won’t walk to her own wedding cowering. She _chose_ this. She’ll see it through, like she’d decided she would.

They reach their destination, a little stonework building near the very end of the village, just before the path slopes downhill and into the forest, a lazy sprawl of open fields behind it that makes for a pretty backdrop to the single spire rising modestly into the sky, and the stained glass windows. The sea is behind her as she walks, the mainland ahead. It seems significant, somehow, but Makino tries not to think about it. She’s always been land-bound, and this won’t make much of a difference (but even as she says it, she feels it, like shackles wrapping tight around her ankles; less like putting down roots and more like being put into the ground, body and soul).

“Last chance, kid,” Suzume says, standing beside her before the half-open door, the muted conversation from within muffled by the carved wood. She has the grace to keep her voice down, and had it been any other day than this, Makino would have asked if she was getting soft in her old age.

She doesn’t answer, and Suzume doesn’t say anything else, just grips her hand once, hard, before walking inside to take a seat, grumbling under her breath about the heat. Makino spies her fishing out a flask from her pocket, cheerfully undaunted by the fact that she’d just stepped into a church. The small familiarity is an unexpected comfort, and it helps anchor her.

She’ll still have this, she thinks. Even if she can’t quite recognise herself anymore, even if she has no idea who she’ll be after today, she’ll still have people around her who remember. Her life is more than just her marriage; is more than her choices and her regrets. She has to remember that.

The guests have all gathered in the pews when she steps through the door, and Makino tries not to notice how lopsided it looks. Compared to hers, which is barely a family, his is extensive, relatives having arrived from far off to attend, and she knows none of their faces, the people looking back at her as she walks the length of the chapel towards the altar. The longest walk of her life, although it’s no more than a few paces to cross the room.

She feels their eyes following her, admiring and politely curious. There are more than a few in navy dress blues—a considerable chunk of the family on his side are marines, and she tries not to think about the irony, when she’d for so long imagined her wedding going differently, outlaws attending rather than officers, and rowdy laughter rather than the imperious quiet that shrouds the room. It feels so _official,_ the atmosphere as stiff as her dress.

There are few guests on her side, but then she has no family left. Instead it’s a handful of close friends and villagers, regular patrons and people she’s known her whole life—the ones who’d been considered close enough to pass as relations. Makino had been too tired to put up a fight about it, to stubbornly say she wanted the whole damn village in the chapel if they had to stack them on top of each other, already recognising it as a battle lost to tradition and propriety (although Suzume, true to form, had invited herself, and promptly told them where they could shove their traditions).

She catches Woop Slap’s gaze from within the pews, the familiar downturn of his mouth seeming to have eased a little at the sight of her, although the look he gives her is curiously resigned. Makino doesn’t have the heart to pry loose the roots of his quiet disappointment, fearing what she’ll find within herself if she does.

Dadan isn’t there, or any of her family. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, they’d told her. Their friendship was tolerated, if considered something of an oddity, but it had been made clear that it wouldn’t have done to have known criminals attending, considering the guests on the groom’s side.

Garp wouldn’t have minded, Makino thinks, missing him then, and fiercely, although she doesn’t know if he would have walked with her, if things had been different—if it had been a different man waiting for her at the altar; if it hadn’t been an altar at all, or even a chapel, but a deck under her feet and the open sky as witness.

She thinks then, the pang of longing so acute she nearly flinches away from it, that she wishes Luffy were there. It wouldn’t have been so quiet, so achingly formal, but inviting the Pirate King to her wedding when even Dadan had been politely told to keep her distance would not have gone over well (although thinking about it now, she feels a flicker of a near-forgotten defiance rise up within her, considering what it might have been like; his hand around her elbow, the whole of him fairly bouncing with energy beside her).

And perhaps she should have fought harder for the things she’d wanted, but she’d been too hurt by her losses to even dare _want_ anything, let alone ask for it.

The man who’ll be her husband looks at her as she approaches, cheeks dimpling with a smile that looks so happy, it makes her insides cinch together in a knot. Makino wishes she had another drink at hand, if only to loosen it; to breathe before she passes out.

“You look beautiful,” he tells her, and with such earnest conviction she almost believes it, even as she can’t help but wonder what it is he sees—if he can’t see the hollowness she feels filling her chest, like she’s being carved out from within; a fragile sea-shell worn away by the water, pretty but pock-marked.

She doesn’t return the sentiment, although not because it’s not true. He’s handsome—a little bland, perhaps, nothing in his face to seize the eye, no scars or prominent laugh-lines, and even smiling, there’s nothing sensual about that mouth.

He doesn’t appear to find anything wrong with her silence, seeming to accept the duck of her head as shy satisfaction, and her lack of response born of the same shyness, when the truth is that she has to turn her eyes away just to make herself stop looking for the things that should be there—deep-grooved scars emphasised by smiling, and a beard darkening his smooth cheeks; the bridge of his nose sharper than it is, and the arch of his brow higher. His hair red, not brown, and—

 _Stop_ , she thinks—pleads, as though it’s _him_ she’s begging, although you can’t beg the dead for anything, Makino knows, least of all to come back.

The little chapel feels suddenly constricting, like the walls are pushing in around her, trapping her. Like the sea at her back, the significance asserts itself, as the kindly little priest murmurs on about duties and vows and a wife’s sacred obeisance.

She doesn’t think she’ll make a good wife. She doesn’t know how to be what he wants her to be, doesn’t even know how to be herself, and all she can think about when she looks for the answer is who she could have been—a pirate, and a pirate’s wife; Empress, even, whatever that had meant once. The image has never seemed further out of her reach, but she clings to it, because it’s the closest she comes to feeling like herself, who she had been and who she’d so desperately wanted to be.

She spares an idle thought to what would happen if the sea would just take her—to rush in across the island, across the fields and the houses, and spirit her away. She tries to look for it, the smell of brine that always lingers in the air, that’s filled the corners of her bar for as long as she's owned it, but the chapel is too far from the shore, the open windows yielding the distant cry of the seagulls by the port, but little else.

The priest is still talking, and her hands are shaking, fingers crooked around the flowers in her grip, trying her best not to crush them. And it’s not nervousness that lashes against her chest with every heartbeat but regret, a sinking realisation that leaves her dizzier than the drink, and she thinks, distantly, that she wants to throw up.

She doesn’t want to do this.

She won’t be _happy_ like this.

But it’s too late now, as the priest looks at her, grey brows raised in an inquiring expression, and Makino realises he’s asked her a question. The one she’s expected to answer; the reason she’s there.

The man beside her is looking at her as well, although this time her silence has replaced his smile with a gentle frown, and it takes all she has to summon her voice, to control it so it doesn’t escape her in a scream. But in looking at him, she sees her life behind his eyes, and once again she falters. Because she might not make a good wife, but she’d make a good mother, Makino thinks—would love her children, whoever their father, and even if they’ll never be Shanks’, there’s a part of her that always will be. Even vows and wedding rings won’t take that from her.

She’s not happy like this, but she might be—one day she might be _happy_ , and she hinges all her faith on that now, because there’s nothing else for her to do. He’s not there for her to wait for, and she can’t keep waiting for happiness to find her instead. She has to make herself happy—she has to _try._

But she can’t find her voice, trapped in her throat. The chapel is quiet, and everyone is looking at her, and she can’t find her voice. Or maybe she can, and it’s the words that she can’t make herself speak—to make herself someone else’s; to make herself _someone else_.

“Makino?”

The murmur brings her back, to find his bemusement having deepened to concern. And she thinks suddenly, fearfully, how he’ll be when it’s just the two of them, without the safety of propriety and the eyes of a whole village to hide behind, and when she’ll have to accept him as her husband in more ways than just an exchange of vows.

She remembers again how Shanks would touch her, and it makes her recoil now, faced with the intrusive thought—of different hands on her, searching out her skin, seeking the hidden parts of her that she doesn’t want to share with anyone else; the little sounds he’d loved to lure from her, and the laughter that was barely more than breath. His name, an invocation on her tongue, and she can’t even bring herself to imagine saying someone else’s, of being touched like that, and it’s almost enough to make her take a step back.

She swallows, fighting down the urge, and reaches again for her voice. Her throat has closed up, and she can’t breathe. It feels like a surrender, accepting him, knowing what it entails—knowing that she’s surrendering more of herself than just her body—but she knows what she has to say. What else is there for her now?

“I—”

The door to the chapel slams open, and so loudly she nearly jumps out of her skin, her answer cut in half, along with her thoughts, the fear inching up her chest frozen with her breath at the sudden interruption.

The entire room turns, Makino with them, seeking the reason for the disturbance, wondering who it might be—who’d not only be late, but who’d barge in without warning or apology.

(there’s a reason why the answer doesn’t come to her immediately, considering both facts—the reason being the weeks she’d held out hope that he’d come back, despite what the newspapers said, and the months she’d mourned him when she’d finally accepted that her hope was in vain; she’d _accepted_ , and so she doesn’t even reach for his name now)

The sun spills in from outside, thick shafts of light thrown across the floorboards, and it takes her eyes a moment to readjust, and to fix on the figure standing in the arching doorway—takes her another to recognise it, the broad shoulders, and the black cloak. The bright red hair, fire-lit by the sun at his back.

The flowers drop from her hands, her fingers slack, and there’s a full beat where Makino doesn’t breathe, staring down the aisle she’d walked up, past the guest towards the open door, and the man standing there, impossibly, and yet—

She doesn’t dare to blink her eyes at first, certain that if she does he’ll vanish—that he’s nothing more than an illusion conjured by a desperate, still-grieving heart. Because it can’t be him—he can’t be _here,_ now of all times and places.

But he doesn’t vanish, and the first, incredulous murmur of “ _Red-Hair?_ ” from her side of the chapel is what drives home the realisation, even before the navy officers on the other side echo the remark, all of them out of their seats, but their shock of a different sort, fury laced with their incredulity, although even the loud exclamations of “Red-Haired Shanks!” doesn’t draw his attention away from where he’s latched his gaze onto hers, as Shanks—alive, not dead as she’d thought but _alive_ —raises his voice to ask, as calmly as though all he’s interrupted is a conversation, not her _wedding_ —

“Am I late?”

 

—

 

He hadn’t stopped to think. Stepping off the ship, he’d barely paused for breath as he’d made for Party’s, only to find it empty, save for the decorations signalling an imminent celebration, and only the fact that it had looked untouched had kept him standing, realising that he might still have time, even if it wasn't much.

He’d turned on his heel, the bat-wing doors shrieking, nearly knocking over a woman on her way inside, her plump arms full of flowers. She’d nearly jumped out of her skin when Shanks had come out, just narrowly avoiding barrelling right into her. He might have sensed her approaching if he’d had the mind to think past the desperation diluting his awareness, like a sharp drink without the pleasant kick, just the blinding hangover.

“Where is she?” he’d asked, forgetting to apologise—unable to think about anything other than the fact that he was late, but he didn’t yet know if he was _too late_.

It had taken her a moment of gaping at him before recognition had entered her eyes, and the desperation on his face must have been something to behold, because less than a second later she’d snapped back to attention.

“The chapel at the end of the village,” she’d told him, not even pausing to inquire what he meant to do—likely understanding what it was, but instead of telling him to leave well enough alone, “You’ll want to hurry!” she'd called after him as Shanks set off at a run.

He hadn’t had time to second guess his decision—to question if he was interrupting something she wanted, that she was happy and that all he'd be doing would be to cause her grief; that she’d just look at him sadly, and tell him gently that she’d already made her choice, and it wasn’t him—that it would never be him.

But he couldn’t have lived with himself, wondering if she might have chosen him if she’d had the chance. Remembering the girl he’d left, and the stubborn rebuke she’d offered upon his suggestion that she might find someone else— _then I’ll kindly tell them where to stick it_ —Shanks couldn’t turn back, couldn’t leave her now without knowing for certain that she wouldn’t choose him if she could.

The once-quiet chapel is brimming with noise, a steadily growing din as the gathered guests recognise just who’d interrupted the ceremony, but Shanks doesn’t spare any of them so much as a glance, gaze still fixed on Makino, standing before the altar.

The man next to her is frowning. The formal wedding kimono looks stark next to the white of her dress, but together, the ensemble looks fitting—looks appropriate, the way it should be, and there’s a second where doubt finds him, as the man drags his gaze from Shanks and back to the woman at his side. “Makino?”

She doesn’t even react. Instead she’s looking at Shanks, like the rest of the chapel has ceased to exist.

And she looks different—looks beautiful, enough that it steals his breath, even as he sees the awkward way she holds herself, as though uncomfortable in her own skin. And she’s nothing like he remembers her, her short hair falling loose of her kerchief to tumble around his fingertips. It’s long now, he sees, and pinned back severely. The dress is lovely, if not exactly what he would have imagined for her (although in those fantasies she’s wearing nothing but sea foam, her hair wet and tangled around his fingers, the sea in her kisses), and the longer he observes her, the more things he finds that look _wrong_ , like the tired weight of her eyes, wide and watching him back. The severe line of her collarbones, more pronounced than it should be, and her thin arms, like she hasn’t been eating. And she’d always been small, but the woman looking back at him is a ghost of the girl he’d left, her skin almost translucent where it had always been flushed, her freckles too pale to even make out from a distance.

He doesn’t know if it’s anger or regret he feels, but thinks it might be both—the first, wondering how the man beside her could have overlooked those things, that even now he doesn’t notice; and the second, recognising what’s likely the reason for her looking like that. That like so many other things, the blame is his to bear.

“Who are you?” the man who’d be her husband asks, although both his name and moniker have been invoked since his arrival.

Shanks’ smile is too hard for cheer, his anger persisting, watching the sharpness of Makino's cheekbones, and the tired shadows darkening the inner corners of her eyes. She’s looking at him like she can’t decide if she wants him to be real—if she wants to hope that he is.

And emboldened by the sight of her, “I’m a pirate,” Shanks says, palm enclosing Gryphon’s pommel, and his fingertips brushing against the old, faded kerchief looped around the hilt. He sees how it draws her gaze, deepening the flicker of hope that’s alighted in her eyes.

His grin widens; it needs no prompting now, because the way she’s looking at him leaves no doubt as to whether he’d made the right decision in coming back.

He watches the man at her side step in front of her, the gesture protective, even as he doesn’t have much to back it up. He’s not a fighter, Shanks sees—not like his relations, all of them on their feet and observing him like an enemy, but then they’re right to do so. He didn’t come to attend.

“You’re interrupting a wedding, pirate,” Makino’s would-be husband says, the slight quaver in his voice betraying his attempted calm, but he’s still angled himself in front of her. Shanks will give him that much; even unarmed and up against someone who’s made several of his military trained relatives step back, he’s not cowering.

But Shanks isn’t there to measure his character, and although it might have made him pause, halted by the thought that she’s found someone who treats her well, who she wants to marry, a single glance at Makino would have dispelled any doubt of whether or not he should be there.

And so, “I know,” Shanks says, this time with a cheer that feels like it takes everything in him to feel, but that also feels like it will consume him whole if he lets it, watching Makino now, her face full of that still-fearful hope. She’d never been good at hiding her feelings, and Shanks has never been more thankful for the fact. “You see, the girl you’re marrying used to be mine.”

Something passes across her face—something acutely _hurt_ , and he doesn’t know if it’s because of the old endearment or the past tense with which he’d invoked it, but he only lets it spur him on. Gripping Gryphon’s hilt, the gesture an overt threat and not even pretending to be anything else, and the response to which is instantaneous, the marines gathered drawing their weapons, Shanks doesn’t take his eyes off hers as he says, and with enough conviction that she’ll feel it—

“And I’m here to steal her back.”

 

—

 

The declaration is what snaps her out of her daze, and then she’s breathing, and _painfully_ —like she suddenly remembers how, and it’s a small miracle she doesn’t break to pieces where she’s standing, watching Shanks across the chapel, hand curled around the hilt of his sword, as though prepared for a fight.

She isn’t given the chance to consider the shift in the atmosphere—the sudden hostility that blossoms, staining the air like a tangible scent, spurred by the weapons drawn—before there are more figures crowding the chapel doorway. And her breath catches, recognising Ben and Yasopp, and Lucky. Doc, and so many faces she doesn’t know, but one by one they file into the ever-shrinking space, the whole crew flanking and backing their captain, and their arrival an echo of another afternoon, a decade-old memory now but their grins are the same, shameless and delighting in her reaction.

“Makino?” Her name reaches her again, sounding a little incredulous now, no doubt at her persisting silence, and lack of an appropriate reaction. It sounds questioning, as though this is somehow her doing, that she could somehow stop them, but it’s with the trembling beginnings of a near-forgotten joy that she wants to tell him that no one could stop this particular crew—and, the joy surging in her breast, an almost reckless feeling, she wants to tell him that even if she could, she wouldn’t want to.

“You told me to ask you again,” Shanks says then, his voice ringing out, loud across the chapel. And if relief had a sound it would be that, she thinks, almost gasping from the need of it, as he adds, that warm, steady timbre roughened with something that makes her heart constrict painfully in her chest, “I’m asking now.”

He grins then— _grins_ , and the tears she hadn’t realised had gathered in her eyes spill over, hot down her cheeks to stain the collar of her dress.

“Come with me,” Shanks says, and if she’d had even half a mind to think beyond the sight of him in front of her, Makino might have told him that it wasn’t a question at all, but she can’t be bothered with cheek or specifics when it’s everything she’s wanted to hear for fourteen years.

The flowers crumble under the sole of her shoe, the first step taken without thinking, because she’s spent months trying to think herself out of her grief, to make a decision even when it felt like it would kill her to do it, and she’s done with thinking. For the first time in months—in years, because she hadn’t made this choice the last time he’d asked her, and she’d regretted it ever since—she just _decides._

“Makino!”

The surprised exclamation doesn’t even faze her. She thinks it probably should, but she can’t be bothered with that, either—not when her chest feels so light, when there’s no trace of the knot from earlier, having unfurled under the caress of his voice, leaving a flutter like a hundred, restless wings, seeming to carry her forward, the sudden surge within her threatening to escape with laughter, and she can’t even remember the last time she’d _laughed_.

The aisle had seemed like the longest walk of her life, walking up, but she’s running so fast it’s barely registered before she’s covered the whole of it, all the faces and the pews rushing past her, forgotten, her heart in her throat along with her breath, but she doesn’t stop, because she has to touch him, to make sure he really is _real_ and not just a figment of her imagination—

Then she’s flung her arms around him, and he’s caught her with a breath, the solid weight of his warm body a greater shock that the impact, but when she crumbles with a sob his arm comes around her back, lifting her off the floor.

One of her shoes slips off, the other threatening to follow suit. Their bodies don’t align; he’s too tall, and broader than he’d been, his presence larger still, but it’s a relief to be small next to him, to be wrapped up in that familiar warmth, enclosed by that strong arm. And it was a giving that didn’t require thought, or even a sliver of doubt—the whole of herself offered up, every last bit, her still-broken heart and too-thin body, nothing left of her fear; the part of her that had recoiled at the prospect of yielding that last, protected piece of herself.

She gives that, too—a sobbing gasp into the crook of his neck, swallowed by his skin. It’s warm, dark against her own, his pulse a living throb beneath it, and he’s alive—he’s _alive,_ and her next sob is louder, muffled by his shirt, her fingers fisting in his hair, so hard her knuckles ache from the pressure.

His arm tightens around her back, pulling her closer, pressing her to his chest until there’s not even a breath of distance between them, and she claims it greedily—his whole body; the hard, sturdy frame of it, and every breath that leaves him, the sudden heave of his shoulders screaming _relief,_  and so loudly it nearly eclipses her own.

There’s a sudden uproar behind her, and the sound of several pistols cocking, followed by the chorusing song of multiple swords freed from their sheaths. Makino feels the arm around her back tighten its hold, the gesture instinctual, and when he shifts his grip to lower her back down there’s already a protest rising up her chest—to say that it’s too soon, that she’s not done yet, she’ll never be _done_ —but even easing her back on her feet, Shanks doesn’t remove his arm from around her.

“Red-Hair,” one of the marines says, from further down the pews. The man who would have been her father-in-law, Makino realises, recognising the voice; the hard cadence that has little kindness in it. “Release her.”

She hasn’t turned her head, face half-buried in his chest, her world nothing but warm skin and the drum of his heart, the whole of her shielded by the protective enclosure of his arm, and she wants to _scream_ —to demand they back down, because this is what she wants, this is the only thing she’s ever wanted, and if they take it from her now—

A trickle of fear finds its way past all the other emotions within her, tossing like a violent sea, recognising the hostile intent in the air, but she didn’t get him back just to lose him again, and suddenly it’s not fear that grips her but _anger_ —that they would take this from her, these people who don’t even know her.

She feels the pistol aimed at her back—doesn’t know how, but she does, as though she can trace the imagined trajectory of the bullet, like a silver thread in her mind, from the mouth of the barrel to the spot between her shoulder blades—and when Shanks makes to move her out of the way, Makino digs her heels into the floor. She’s lost both her shoes, and her bare feet makes the difference between their sizes even greater, but her stubbornness makes up for it, and she doesn’t budge. She’d let them shoot her before they got him, the knowledge is so calm when it finds her, it doesn't even surprise her.

She feels Shanks’ understanding—and his subsequent protest in the almost painful grip of his arm, but before he can physically shove her out of the way, the sound of a single pistol cocking shatters the tense quiet.

A startled gasp draws everyone’s eyes to the altar, and turning her head, Makino’s jaw proceeds to drop, recognising the wiry little woman having stepped forward, the barrel of the pistol in her hand aimed at her fiancé head.

“Weapons down,” Suzume drawls, her eyes on the groom but the warning directed at the navy officers, “or this wedding will be a funeral. Wouldn’t make much of a difference to me—we’re already in a church, and the groom’s dressed for the occasion. But you guys might want to reconsider. I’m too damn old for mercy, and the mess will be a bitch to clean up.”

No one moves, not even to protest, seeming too stunned to wrap their heads around the turn of events.

Makino doesn’t blame them. The image should have looked ridiculous—a knot of old limbs, she’s barely any taller than Makino, and the threat should have prompted laughter, but the wrinkled hand wrapped around the pistol looks like it had been made to hold it, a proficiency refusing to be denied in her unwavering aim, as though all but daring anyone to challenge it.

“Holy shit,” she hears a voice murmur, laughter and grudging admiration in it, and— _Yasopp_ , Makino thinks, dazedly, although it’s fled her mind already with her next breath.

“Cutting it damn close, Red,” Suzume says then, the words directed at Shanks, the slant of her smile as sharp as the gleam of the weapon in her hand. “I’ll give you this, though,” she adds, her grin widening further, the flash of yellowed teeth bright in the sunlight that had come in with the crew, “Roger never made an entrance this dramatic, and that guy made an event of getting out of bed in the morning.”

The remark doesn’t even register at first, and when it does it takes Makino a full second of gaping before she can find her voice, although she doesn’t know what she means to say—doesn’t know which fact to even focus on, watching the ease with which she’s aiming the pistol (where had she even kept it hidden? had she come prepared for a gunfight?), uncaring of the consequences, or the retribution it might earn her.

“Oh, I’ll be fine, kid,” Suzume says, to the question she hasn’t voiced. “I’ve gotten out of worse fixes.” A snort, and under her breath, “Roger’s bed being one of ‘em.”

She wants to protest—she wants to say _something_ instead of just gaping like a fish, but everything is happening so fast, and she can barely keep up. But like her whole presence had always seemed shaped from stubborn obstinacy, the old woman’s look brooks no argument, the decisive nod meant for Shanks, before her eyes cut to Makino, seeming to say _what the hell are you waiting for, a wedding march?_

Looking at Shanks then—and she can hardly believe that she is; that he’s real, that he's  _there_ —she finds her elusive voice, and the words that have been perched at the bow of her heart for fourteen years, waiting to be spoken, yearning to be, when she’d thought she’d never get the chance, and _finally_ —

“Take me with you,” Makino breathes—pleads, orders, she doesn’t care which it is, cares only that he’ll do it. It feels suddenly like the only thing that matters.

She tries not to focus too hard on how relieved he looks—how wide his smile suddenly is, creasing his eyes where they roam her face, his look that warm, gently marvelling thing that had always made her feel like he'd never quite seen anything like her—because if she does, Makino fears he might have to carry her to the ship.

“Ben,” Shanks says then, the calm address prompting her attention. And looking to her right, her gaze finding purchase in a familiar face, the words are halfway off her tongue with a sobbing laugh—to ask _what happened to your_ hair, _Ben Beckman?_ —but looking at him, she can’t manage either, finding in the warmly enduring gaze meeting hers the last bit of conviction she needs, as though the living man in her arms and the whole crew at his back hadn’t been enough.

Ben only nods, stepping forward, and it’s his captain’s implicit order that he answers, but Makino feels it’s also an answers to her—to the silent question begged, that they won’t whisk her away without making sure the ones she leaves behind are safe. Because it might be a selfish choice she’s making—the man who would have been her husband still standing at the altar behind her, gaping—but being selfish doesn’t come easy for her heart, and she won’t leave them to their fates without a backwards glance.

“I’ll make sure the old girl gets out,” Ben says. He’s holding a pistol of his own, a cigarette between his teeth, and even the shock of grey hair and the deeper grooves of his severe features doesn’t succeed in making him unfamiliar, even if it’s been fourteen years since Makino saw him last.

Suzume snorts. “Appreciate the gesture, lad, but I’ll manage. What are they going to do, claim a little old lady held the groom at gunpoint, allowing the bride to escape with a crew of pirates?” She throws a look across the chapel to the marines. “Good luck selling that to your superiors.”

One of the officers is red-faced with fury, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “W-we have witnesses!”

“I’ve seen no such thing,” Woop Slap speaks up calmly, before the agreement is echoed behind him, and Makino looks towards the guests who’d come for her, startled, as Woop Slap adds dryly, “And she’s known for having moments of senility. It’s the unfortunate fate of the old, but you can't hold it against them.”

“She's even claiming she knew Gold Roger!” someone calls out.

“Yeah, you can’t take her seriously—she’s clearly losing it!”

Pistol still aimed with unforgiving intent and nothing even hinting at senility in those sharp crow’s eyes, Suzume shrugs, as though to say _what are you gonna do?_

It’s hard to say if it’s a laugh or a sob that’s trembling at the bottom of her throat, but whichever it is, the gratitude that fills her is the same, watching the faces looking back at her from the pews—for the first time since she’d walked in they’re wearing smiles suited for a wedding.

“You ready to get out of here?” Shanks asks her then, the smile that accompanies the question belonging to a much younger man, the one who’d once asked her to leave her life behind and sail away with him. And he’s older than he was—she’s only now beginning to notice it, the deeper laugh-lines and the veins of silver in his hair, the darker beard—but then so is she, and there’s nothing for her here. She’d asked for the sea to take her, and it came. She’s not hesitating now.

She kicks her discarded shoes out of the way, lifting the skirt of her dress, and when his grin widens Makino feels, for a single second, like herself—like the girl she had been, and the one she could have been, the one she’d spent fourteen years _wanting_ to be, the pirate with the sea in her hair, and the world at her feet.

And when Shanks takes her hand she leaves those ill-fitting pieces of herself on the doorstep of the chapel—the awkward wife-to-be, the once-sheltered port-town girl who’d grown restless in the quiet—and when he asks this time, with touches instead of words, calloused fingers cradling hers so carefully, as though afraid she’ll pull them away, she says _yes_ with her whole body.

The harbour is filled with people when they arrive, the whole village seeming to have shown up, like well-wishers for a wedding that hasn’t even taken place, leaning out of windows and doorways to watch them pass, to see her off—smiles following in her wake, and calls for her to take care, to call back sometime with news, to be _happy._

The dress is still uncomfortably tight, caging her ribs, aching to breathe now that she remembers how. Her veil is heavy and tugging at her scalp, but her feet are bare in the hard-packed dirt, her hair coming loose from its rigid updo, tendrils teased free by the sea breeze reaching for her, a wet kiss of sun and brine. And despite everything, that one little sense of _rightness_ after so long of everything feeling wrong is almost enough to make her knees buckle.

But the hand wrapped around hers keeps her from stumbling, gripping her harder now, even as she feels how it shakes, his fingers warm and rough sword-callouses scuffing her knuckles. And it’s not an aisle or an altar waiting, no church spire but rising masts piercing the open sky, but when he helps her onto the gangway, the implication is the same—a marriage, but to more than just the man asking it.

And there are no chapel walls caging her in, only the open deck of his ship, the sea stretched out before her with naked horizons beckoning, and she’s never in her life felt more free, even with the choice she makes—the silent vow that’s pressed into the heart of his palm, and the living pulse beating under his skin that echoes the one within her, saying, each time a little bolder, _mine, mine, mine._

But the sea doesn’t protest her silent claim, or even deny her the right to make it. Instead it welcomes her in—takes them both for herself, but there’s no resistance when Makino looks for it now, just the first beginnings of happiness, stirring a riptide beneath the waters within her that have been quiet for far too long.

 

—

 

It doesn’t fully dawn on him until they’re drawing away from the port, that she’s _there_ —that they’re leaving, putting Fuschia and Dawn Island behind them but that he’s not leaving _her_ this time; that her presence suggests he never will again. And Shanks has no idea where they’re going, hasn’t set a course except _away_ , but doesn’t have a mind to bother with specifics now, every thought claimed by the shape standing beside him on the deck.

Her wedding dress is rumpled, the white hem and the soles of her small feet smudged with dirt, her bare arms gathering goosebumps in the breeze filling the sails, the sharp caress making the veil in her hair dance. And she would have stood out amidst his crew even without her finery; a small, white dove surrounded on all sides by salt-stained and sea-weary pirates, many of them familiar, but it’s been fourteen years, and his crew has grown—there are many she doesn’t know, although they all know her.

The celebratory atmosphere is familiar, the tense anticipation that had preceded their arrival having loosened, carried off on the sea breeze, and they’re all looking at her now—the reason they’d come, and for so many of his men a long-awaited answer to an often asked question. He catches the murmurs—finds her name in them, their awe softened, or at least attempted, but his crew doesn’t know how to be quiet.

She’s quailing a little under all the attention, Shanks sees, realisation seeming to be dawning on her too, of what she’s done.

A look at Ben precedes the order he gives, his voice hardened to make sure it carries above the din and the breeze, and the weight of command in it makes her jump, but the effect is felt, and then they’re scrambling to their posts, Ben stepping in to oversee, the exchange as easy as it’s always been.

And in the wake of the tumult, Shanks nudges Makino in the direction of his cabin, the promise of privacy offered with the silent suggestion, and his hand on the small of her back. He’s let his fingers slip from hers, but stays close as she walks, seeming to find comfort in the shield of his body, although the others have turned their eyes elsewhere. Well—most of them, but the rest follow suit when he sweeps his gaze across the deck, the sharp furrow of his brows speaking the order this time, but it’s no less effective.

Holding the door open, he lets her enter first, before letting it slip closed behind him, shutting them off from the rest of the ship, and the afternoon sun bearing down on the deck. It’s cooler inside his quarters, the sunlight spilling through the portholes diluted, seeming silver rather than gold. It dances off the copper oil lamp, and the navigator’s tools on his desk, slanting soft, oddly-shaped shadows across the planks towards his bunk, dancing in tune with the gentle sway of the ship.

She’s come to a stop in the middle of his cabin. The captain’s quarters, it’s the biggest on the ship, although he’s never been one to claim more than he needs, but she looks small where she’s standing, her hands wrapped around her arms, a protective cross. Shanks follows the lift of her chin, tracking the direction of her gaze as she takes in the wide desk and the maps strewn across it, before she turns her head to the bunk tucked against the bulkhead, the sheets still rumpled, and the armchair with one of his shirts thrown across the back of it.

He notes how her eyes linger on the pile of books stacked next to his bunk. It’s not even close to all there is, the ones he’s collected over the course of a decade, but the way her gaze stays on them stills the words in his chest. It’s probably for the best—if he opens his mouth to talk, Shanks doesn’t think he’ll stop.

She hasn’t made to speak, or turn around to look at him, and he tries his best to pretend it’s not making him _nervous_ , the prolonged hush that’s fallen over his quarters like a veil, shrouding the near-mindless joy that had followed him onto the ship, her hand tucked in his.

Was she regretting her decision?

Eyes on her back, still turned towards him, Shanks traces the fall of her veil, the sheer slip of gauzy fabric nearly brushing the planks at her feet, and he’s about to ask—what, he’s not sure, just knows he needs to say something to fill the silence, the one that feels like it’s holding over a decade’s worth of unspoken things in it—but before he can open his mouth, Makino reaches up to touch the comb nestled in her hair, the one holding the veil in place.

He first mistakes it for a nervous gesture, remembering how she’d reach for things to fiddle with to distract herself, but then her fingers are curled, white-knuckled around the pearl-studded comb, and she _tugs_ —sharply, painfully, a hiss slipping through her clenched teeth at the resistance it offers, the sound caught in a shivering sob, but it doesn’t deter her, and the next tug is more frantic still, until she’s all but ripping it from her hair.

He’s covered the distance in less than a breath, fingers catching hers to pull them away, even as she stubbornly tries to reach for the comb again.

“Makino.”

The sound of her name runs like a jolt through her body, but the tender press of his fingers to her wrist stills her struggling, her other hand falling, clenched to a fist at her side. The comb with the veil sags against her neck, still caught in her hair, coming loose of the pins holding it together.

Releasing her wrist, Shanks makes to pull out a pin—then another, and another, until they’re littering the planks at their feet, the removal careful, meticulous and deliberate where hers had been frenzied and desperate. But she lets him do it, standing still as he works, slender shoulders hunched forward and her arms slack along her sides.

The last pin yields the comb, the heavy weight of her hair free to fall down her back unhindered, dark and tangled with odd snarls and unnatural curls, and as though it’s released something else, the _sob_ that leaves her takes the rest of her with it, before he’s caught her, his arm around her waist and his nose tucked into the folds of her hair, the back of her neck with the too-pale freckles.

He feels her next sob when it rips from her, a sharp jerk and the sound choking on her breath, but she doesn’t shove him away, just sinks back into him, heavy in his grip despite her slight shape, the protruding bones and the too-white skin stretched across them. But she’s solid and breathing, and there’s an almost perverse kind of relief to feel her sobbing, nothing held back now, remembering how she’d looked in that chapel, her eyes hollow like she’d forgotten how to feel anything—as though she’d made herself forget.

Nose pressed into her neck as she convulses, Shanks just holds her, that in itself a relief, after so long. He’s greedy with it, the feel of her, the delicate shape of her body and the sound of her voice, and it’s selfish—so wholly, unbelievably _selfish,_ wanting her, needing her so badly he can barely breathe past it, and even with the assurance of her choice, he’s loath to let go of her now, fearing that she’ll change her mind; that she won’t let him touch her again like this.

It takes a little while for her sobs to trickle down, breathless hiccups to the soundless shake of her shoulders. She’s resting her weight on his arm, the only thing keeping her standing, her hands gripping his forearm and her fingertips digging into his skin, like she can’t decide if she wants to pull it closer or shove it away.

The clench of her fingers tells him to loosen his grip, even as it takes everything he has to release her, although he doesn’t step away from her as she turns to face him.

They’re standing so close she has to crane her neck to look at him, but she doesn’t step back, to put distance between them, her eyes searching his face, before taking in the rest of him—as though finally _seeing_ him. Shanks tracks the thoughts across her face, as open to him as it’s always been; sees the stubborn disbelief knitting her brows, and the trembling purse of her lips.

Loose now, her hair frames her face, a wild, tangled mass where it should be sleek and heavy, and there are dark streaks under her eyes that she’s quick to wipe away when she sees him noticing, as though taking offence at the cosmetics like she did her hair—as though they’re parts she doesn’t want, and is just now realising how much. And she’s still crying, her shoulders shaking with residual sobs, but they’re silent, even as her expression is anything but.

She’s breathtaking, and he means to tell her, the words already taking shape on his tongue, prompted by something beyond his control, when she beats him to it, and her voice when it leaves her wraps around his heart like a fist.

“You let me think you were dead,” Makino says, the accusation too gentle to be as sharp as it should be, as he deserves, but then there's never been anything sharp about her, heart or voice or temperament.

His expression softens, but he doesn’t try to excuse himself, or to explain. She’s right—is right to be angry. It’s what _she_ deserves, and part of him wishes she could be as furious as she should be.

“I’m sorry,” Shanks says instead. It’s all he has to give her. It’s not enough, not even close.

Her lower lip trembles, swollen from the bite of her teeth, like she’s forcibly holding back a sob—or a shout, but, “How could you let me think you were dead?” she asks, and her voice breaks, shoots cracks as fresh tears spill over her cheeks, flushed now with anger and furious disbelief. “A _year_ , Shanks.”

There is an explanation. He hadn’t done it out of neglect, although he doubts that’s what she believes; doubts she'd think him capable of being so careless. He’d thought she’d known he was alive, that he’d survived, until Ben had discovered otherwise—had thought Garp would have told her, or Luffy, but neither had been the case. And that was his mistake, for assuming—for not doing what he should have done, the second he’d been well enough to call her. For selfishly wanting the first thing he said to her to be in person, not over the phone.

“I _waited_ ,” she says then, the last word bit off with a sob. “Even after I heard, I waited, but you didn’t come back. Why didn't you come back?" Her voice wavers, the murmur so small it barely has any sound, and something clenches painfully in his chest. "You didn’t even call, and—and I could have waited longer if you’d just told me.”

That makes him frown, but before he can protest, she’s forged on, her voice yielding something else now, something he recognises with a startled jerk as _guilt_ , as she says, “I wouldn’t have—I would _never_ have—”

And he realises then, hearing the words left unspoken, that it’s not _him_ she’s blaming, and the shock that seizes him is enough to claim whatever was left of his breath.

But of course she would— _she_ would, with that selfless, forgiving heart, and he’s not surprised that it’s anger he feels upon realising it.

“ _Makino_.”

Her name leaves him, rips from his mouth, harder than he’s ever spoken it, but it does something, Shanks sees—as though it startles her back into awareness, finding his expression incredulous; as though she’s finally realising what it is she’s saying, and how ridiculous it sounds. She thought he was dead, but it wasn’t her fault for moving on—for trying to, and he’s relieved when the awareness sinks into her features, settling with something that looks like understanding.

“I almost married someone else,” she says—tells him, but it still doesn’t sound like the accusation it should be, and so, harder this time, the blame redirected, the way it should be, anger striking through the gentle lilt of her voice like the lash of a whip, “I almost married _someone else_!” Makino nearly spits.

Her fingers curled to a fist, Shanks thinks she means to hit him, and doesn’t even flinch, welcoming it. But anger has never rested easily in that heart, and it leaves her with a shuddering sob, rushes out of her as her fist thumps weakly against his chest, before the rest of her follows, her whole body pitching forward, but this time when he catches her it’s not to hold her up.

He steals the kiss without asking, his head ducked to seek her mouth, unable to stop himself, but then he’s already stolen her, and it’s the knowledge all thieves carry, that one thing pilfered will only deepen the urge of wanting, and he’s never wanted anything in his life as much as her. And it’s with unbearable relief that he feels her pushing _back,_ her hands fisting in his hair and her lips parted, her returning kiss gasped into his mouth, her tongue darting past his to deepen it, and her reciprocation almost makes him forget how to respond in turn.

He hasn’t kissed her in fourteen years—not since their parting kiss on the Fuschia docks, but there’s nothing of parting in the hungry crush of his mouth against hers, and his hand gripping her hair in a fist, her body pinioned to his with his arm, needing her as close as she'll come.

The reckless urgency of the kiss pushes him forward, half-stumbling with purpose but no plan, just the painful clench of _want_ in his gut that he follows blindly. The edge of his desk collides with her back, a hiss of pain sucked past her teeth, but he doesn't pause, his arm slipping under her hips to lift her instead, settling her onto the stack of maps, and there’s barely a hitch before they’re kissing again, a single, starved gasp from her lips all that breaks the connection.

There’s little of grace in it—it’s inelegant and messy, the rasp of his breath loud in the quiet, a rough pant against her mouth. One of the maps tears under her weight when she shifts, and the navigator's tools tumble off when he pushes her back, followed by the unopened bottle of whiskey that had been holding down one corner of the stack. It clatters loudly on the boards, before rolling towards his bunk, but Shanks doesn’t spare it a second thought, pushing closer, between her legs, parted invitingly to let him.

His face gripped between her hands, he feels as they fall away, reaching for his shirt to push it off, a desperation in small, shaking fingers that doesn’t ask but _needs_ , and it’s hanging off his shoulders when she abandons the venture altogether, reaching instead for the zipper on his pants.

He stops thinking, just _feels_ —the soft skin of her thigh when he pushes the dress up to her waist, the fabric bunching over her hips, before her hands leave his open zipper to reach for the laces in the back, tugging until the bodice loosens, something like a sigh rushing out of her, but she’s barely let the breath go before she’s gripped the hem, to pull the whole of it over her head.

It snags in her hair, her elbow stuck in one of the sleeves, and there a sound of impatience that’s almost like a furious sob, muffled by the mound of fabric, and that prompts a startled smile to break across his face.

Then she’s pulled the dress off, tossing it away, and there’s a moment where all Shanks does is stare at her, seated on his desk, bared but for her thin undergarments, her hair a dark tumult around her thin shoulders and her lips swollen, but from the kiss this time, from him, and the thought strikes him that if things had gone a little differently—if he hadn’t made it back in time, or even at all—there’d be someone else seeing her this way. There’d be someone else undressing her, and kissing her—someone else taking her, seeking the touches that would yield those small sounds he barely remembers, and someone else’s name shaped, wordless on her tongue.

The next kiss he steals is bruising, no restraint behind it, unable to shake the thought of her, someone else’s wife, responding to someone else’s touches. And he’s not possessive by nature but it _seizes_ him now, their mouths colliding and his hand gripping the back of her neck as she arches back against him, but she doesn’t push him off, or ask what’s gotten into him.

Dropping his hand from her neck, following the too-pronounced ridge of her spine, his fingers scramble for the fastenings of her brassiere like it’s causing him personal offence, an oath bit against her mouth, before he’s pushing it off her shoulders, and the press of her breasts to his chest rattles his self-control so thoroughly he has to grip the desk for support.

Her hands come up to cup his cheeks then, the brush of her thumbs across them so light he clenches his eyes shut, because he hasn't been touched like that in years, not since her, and, “ _Shanks_ ,” Makino says—breathes his name like a prayer, a half-whimpered plea, and abruptly, he forgets that there was almost someone else, and that she was almost someone else’s. Like every other potential outcome, it ceases to matter, dispelled by her touch, and the softer caress of her voice. The only thing that matters is what she is, which is— _his_ , although the thought stutters in his mind, as though he’s afraid to name her that even to himself, even as she gives herself over, parts her legs and bares herself whole, and tells him to _take._

The lace-lined hem of her panties catches on his fingers, before he’s pulling them down her legs, the attempt fumbling and hurried, but he can’t wait, so hard he can barely think, and he can’t focus past the need to have her, so urgent it leaves him shaking, begging for release—for her, more than anything.

It’s desperate when he finally takes her, his hand under her ass, lifting her enough to align their hips before pushing inside her, and the feel of her as she envelops him is almost too much, the tight warmth consuming him, pulling him apart, seam by seam as she wraps herself around him, meeting his thrust like a welcome.

It seems a mutual reprieve, by the shivering moan she breathes into his ear, and when she tightens her legs around his hips it drives every last, coherent thought from his mind.

It’s an awkward, slightly stilted rhythm at first, hip to hip with the table supporting her weight, and his hand beneath her, pushing her closer, her breaths panting, each holding a sound like a sob clenched between her teeth, and he means to ask her if the angle is wrong, if she’s in pain, when Makino locks her ankles behind his back and pushes herself so close, he sinks so deep in her he forgets—everything.

The groan that leaves him cuts off, stuck in his throat, and he can’t think, can only feel her, moving with him, a little hesitant at first, as though re-learning how—as though with each thrust she remembers a little more, of herself, and of him, and the kiss she drinks from his mouth is so deep it steals his breath, urging him closer, even as he’s already buried in her to the hilt.

“Is this good?” he breathes, the question nearly lost in the kiss, and her nod is heavy—her reply broken by the little moan that leaves her, which is answer enough. He’s close, so close that he feels a single breath away from coming apart completely, even as he tries his best to last, to prolong the moment that feels like it will be his last, to savour the feel of her while he has her.

He comes first—no surprise, but he is surprised he lasted so long, when just the sight of her on his desk had threatened to do it; the heave of her small breasts and her mouth parted for air, meeting him with those soft, breathy whimpers—and it’s a climax that courses through him like a tidal wave, the release so abrupt he has to catch himself against the desk, his knees buckling under his own weight.

Her arms tighten around his shoulders, softly calloused palms pressed to his back, but even with his strength spent he doesn’t surrender himself yet. Instead, easing his hand out from underneath her, it’s to reach for her warmth, and the deliberate sweep of his thumb between her legs draws a stuttering gasp from her, the mewl whisper-faint compared to the way she _jerks_ at the touch.

Still coming down, he’s not hurried this time, the slow rub of his thumb seeking rather than demanding, searching for the things he’d known once, the touches she’d liked that had been second-nature, and the parting of his mouth over her breast traps her voice in the back of her throat. Shanks feels her head drop back, and ducks his own—sweeps his tongue over a pert nipple and shifts his hand, and when she breaks he’s already there to catch her.

She comes, still wrapped around him, her breath escaping her in rapid pants, and his name, again—and again, as though reacquainting herself with the shape of it, the taste, each inflection different as she falls apart under his touch, until it’s no more than a breath, murmured into the air.

Spent, she leans into him, bearing his weight as he does hers, her hands smoothing over his skin, as though seeking to remember more than just the shape of his name. He feels the tentative brush of her fingers over muscle and scar tissue, new and old, feels her pause on his shoulders, on his hips, before carding through the thick hair climbing up his abdomen and across his chest.

A tired, tender kiss pressed to the crown of her head, and he tries to ignore how badly he’s shaking, but hears it in the shuddering sigh lost to her hair. The sunlight reaching through the portholes teases out the green amidst the black, and lights her skin, white as sea foam where it slips under his fingers as he traces a caress along her ribcage, the swell of her breast, to curve his hand around the back of her neck.

“This is kind of a roundabout way of doing it,” Shanks says—breathes the chuckle into her skin, softer than anything he's ever touched. A light sheen of sweat beads her collar, salt when he seeks it with a kiss. He nuzzles her throat, feels the still-frantic throb of her pulse, and her breaths, half-sobbed into his ear. “I’m pretty sure the consummation is supposed to happen _after_ the wedding.”

Makino sobs—then laughs, the sound a thick, tear-filled hiccup. “I’ve had enough of traditions,” she says, small hands shaking on his shoulders. Then, with a murmur, “And it’s technically after _a_ wedding, just not ours.”

His own laugh is as startled as it is loud, but he doesn’t draw back from where he’s leaning on her, and she only grips him tighter in return, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, as though she never means to let go. Shanks isn’t about to ask her.

Boneless with a deep-seated exhaustion, he has just enough mind left to hope that no one should decide it a good moment to enter, given that he’s still inside her and with his bare ass on display, but the thought is quickly forgotten, chased off by Makino’s breaths, and the tuck of her nose into his throat. Anything beyond the immediate circle of her arms becomes curiously unimportant.

“Shanks?” she says then, quietly. She’s rested her cheek on his shoulder, fingertips stroking lightly down his back, the slight tremor in them hinting at nervousness.

He’s heavy with a creeping lethargy that’s threatening to drag him off to sleep, the warmth of her still around him and her soft breaths under his chin only tempting him further. He should carry her to his bunk, to wrap himself around her instead, but he’s curiously loath to move, or do anything that requires breaking the quiet spell they’re under.

“What?” he asks, the word kissed under her ear, recognising her gentle stalling—the way she has of circumventing a subject, which tells him it’s something she wants. She’d never been good at asking for things, let alone issue demands, for all his attempts at instilling it in her; little, teasing nudges, urging her to claim her due. And he doesn’t know what she wants to ask of him, but is already prepared to give it, whatever it turns out to be.

She’s quiet, fingers worrying the hair at his nape, and her nose buried in his throat. She’s so small, the frame of his body seeming to engulf her where she sits, her legs wrapped loosely around his hips, and she’s very clearly making an effort not to meet his eyes now. And there’s a second where Shanks wonders if she’s changed her mind about asking, and he’s prepared to tell her— _ask me anything, ask me everything_ —when the quiet murmur leaves her, pressed with her lips to his skin.

“Call me your girl again?”

His hand stills in her hair where he'd been carding his fingers through it. And it’s such a small request, in the great scheme of things—the very least she could have asked of him, when he’s prepared to give her _everything_ —but the way she asks it, as though it really is everything, breaks his heart. And it’s well over a decade since he’d last called her that, with conviction—since he’d named her his, the only thing having held him back from doing it now being the lingering tendrils of worry that she wouldn’t want to be.

He almost laughs—at himself, for worrying, and her, for voicing the question like she’s asking the world of him. And it’ll take time, he thinks, reaching the ease with which they’d loved each other once; a few more bumps in the road, not back to what they’d been but to what they'll be, but he would have paid more than time to have her—to be allowed to re-learn how to have her.

He doesn’t hesitate. And the endearment is old, but he makes it new in speaking it, and, “My girl,” he names her, kissing her shoulder. He hears how her breath catches, feels her arms tightening around him, and so he says it again, the touch of his lips to the delicate slope of her collarbone imprinting the words on her skin, “ _My girl_.”

Then, pausing for a breath—“My wife,” he murmurs, under her ear; then to her jaw, to the trembling corners of her mouth, as though testing the endearment that’s so much more than that, “My wife, my wife,” he repeats. Not a question, because he’s not asking now, and when she laughs, the sound thick and wet with tears, it’s not an answer, except it is—it’s _everything_.

 

—

 

It doesn’t take long to relay their intention to the crew—doesn’t take long for them to scramble together a party from nothing, all of them springing into action, as though they’ve been awaiting those very orders since stepping aboard. From the fondly exasperated look Shanks slips her, Makino wonders if that wasn’t the case.

“No veil this time?” Ben asks, when she finds him on deck, having emerged from the warm safety of Shanks’ cabin, wearing all the evidence on her face, but she doesn't care, finding nothing but delight in the grins greeting her, and the warmth filling her chest makes her forget to be embarrassed.

“I tossed it overboard,” Makino says, crossing her arms, a challenge rather than for protection this time, as she adds, chin raised, “along with the dress.”

His smile quirks, seeming pleased by her answer. And he makes no comment on her choice of apparel, but the amusement that brims under his level features is a warm one, and she bears the attention without flinching this time.

Shanks’ shirt is far too big on her, the sleeves rolled up and bunching around her elbows, the top button so low the plunging neckline is only salvaged from being indecent by her modest chest. The pants he’d given her are an old pair (he'd helped her slip them on, the scrape of his beard preceding the kiss to the inside of her knee, grinning at her laughing protests when he'd kneeled down to pull them off again), the fabric soft and worn where it catches against her palms, and cinched tight at the waist so as not to slip right off her hips. They smell like him, the scent clinging to her like the folds of the fabric, gently reverent.

Her feet she's left bare, her hair brushed free of snarls and tangles, sleek and heavy where it spills down her back and tied loosely at her nape with the old kerchief he’d pilfered once, the one he’d kept wrapped around the hilt of his sword for over a decade. The flower pattern is faded, the bright colours half-forgotten, but the offering had been significant when he’d tugged it loose and presented it—a piece of the girl she’d been when he’d first stolen it, before he’d come back to steal her in turn. The physical reminder of the promise he’d made her, and that he’d kept.

And she doesn’t look like a bride but she feels like one, for the first time since waking up that morning, and when Ben’s smile tugs upwards, speaking of understanding, Makino returns it with one that’s so wide it hurts her cheeks.

They’re crossing the East Blue, Dawn Island long behind them and the sea unfolded on all sides, the evening sun meeting the horizon in a molten kiss, and the deck around her is crowded, so many pirates she hasn’t had the chance to count them all. A bigger crew than the one that had left her, but wherever she turns there’s a smile for her, and her name on unfamiliar tongues, greeting her, even as she doesn’t know theirs—not because she doesn’t remember, but because she doesn’t know them, these pirates who all seem to know her, as though they’ve always had.

It should have made her nervous, all the attention, all the people calling her name, seeking her gaze, but instead it eases like a comfortable weight across her shoulders, and when the feeling finds her she doesn’t even recognise it at first.

 _Belonging_ —and it’s what she feels, standing at the bow, at the very heart of the crowd, as though she was never meant to be anywhere else.

She’s getting married today, and that truth remains, even as everything else has changed—no chapel here, just the open deck of her husband’s ship, and no holy priest, only Ben. Nothing about a wife’s duties or deference, just simple words offered by an old friend, speaking of a mutual partnership, and a devotion that’s spanned several seas; that's bridged a whole decade of years, and then some.

Someone tucks a flower behind her ear, and a cup of sake into her hands—first a small disc, then one that’s a little bigger, then a third even bigger still, each one exchanged, their fingers bumping, and his are shaking, Makino sees, even as her own remain wholly still, and steady around the ceramic cups.

But Shanks’ grin is wider than she’s ever seen it, and he has to be reminded to drink the sake, distracted by holding her gaze across the rims of their cups—the cheeky shout of “it’s part of the ceremony, Boss, I can’t believe we have to give you instructions on how to drink!” reaching them from across the crowded deck, followed by an ear-deafening chorus of laughter—and then he’s laughing so hard he’s spilled half of it down his front.

The sun sinks into the sea, and she’s married between one gasping laugh and the next, and when he kisses her this time she meets him halfway, presses herself as close as she’ll get and takes all of him, the scrape of his beard and the scars, the familiar grooves under her fingertips where she cradles his face in her hands. His fingers dip into her hair, tugging loose the knot of the kerchief, as though itching to steal it back.

Makino gives herself instead—every last piece that she’d brought on board with her; all of them hers, and none of them an ill fit.

 

—

 

“Hey,” her new husband tells her later, the galley filled to the brim and the wedding party still ongoing, and showing no signs of ceasing. The murmur seeks her under the din, and when she tilts her head it’s to find his brows quirking. She’s curled up on one of the benches, her feet in his lap, and his hand is warm where it’s wrapped around her ankle, the rough pads of his fingers tracing an idle pattern up and down the arch of her foot. “What are you thinking about?”

She tastes the smile on her mouth; it’s still taking time getting used to smiling again, but she’s done it more in the past few hours than she has in the past year. “About what my life would have been like if you hadn’t come back,” Makino answers honestly.

The smile he gives her in turn looks a little sad; she finds the shadow of it in his eyes. “Yeah?”

She considers the phantom memories of the day; the wedding that had almost been, that feels like another life entirely. And there are many things she could tell him, Makino thinks—that she doesn’t think it would have been much of a life; that she doesn’t think she would have been happy, not truly, even if she’d given it time. Happiness born of complacency is just a shadow of the real thing, the feeling that grips her now, that fills her whole, so much of it, it feels like she doesn’t have room for it all. As though it’s found every hollowed-out space within her and filled it up.

She could tell him she doesn’t know how she would have lived, as someone else’s wife. A new day will dawn in a few hours, and they’re miles away from the island she’d left, and the future she would have woken to if she’d stayed, but she can’t even imagine it, waking up next to someone else, someone who's not him.

(part of her wonders if she should feel guiltier, for the man she'd left without a thought or a word of apology, but it's difficult to hold on to her guilt when she feels so happy she can barely breathe, and it's selfish but it's good—it's so _good_ , being happy)

Lifting her eyes, it's to find Shanks watching her back, his look considering, and she wonders how much convincing it had taken him to go back for her, knowing what she’d planned to do. It wasn’t a decision made lightly, she knows. He’d interrupted her wedding knowing full well she might just as easily have turned him down as gone with him.

She could tell him a whole world of things, of a whole life that would never have felt like hers, but, “I’m glad you did,” Makino says simply, and finds his expression softening. But before he can speak—

“So,” Yasopp interjects, dragging their eyes away from each other as he makes to take a seat, pushing Ben’s legs out of the way to make room for himself, right between Doc and Lucky on the bench opposite. “Traded in for a better wedding, eh, Ma-chan? Was going to say a better husband, but I don’t know the poor sod you left at the altar. Might have been a catch for all we know.” But the look he slips her tells her enough—that they’d judged him, and found him lacking.

“It was touch-and-go there for a while, though. We weren’t sure what you’d do,” Yasopp says then, with a grin that tells Makino that they did know, and well, even as he quips, with a glance at his captain, “The betting pool hasn’t been this big since that whole ordeal with the nightdress.”

Shanks’ retort doesn’t really succeed in being the lighthearted quip he tries for. “You know I can’t resist a good gamble,” he says, before meeting her eyes, something achingly exposed in the look he gives her, contrasting his words. “But I felt confident with the odds.”

“You were so nervous you vomited your breakfast over the railing,” Ben says, the dry remark shattering the tension, and the startled laugh that blurts from her takes them all by surprise, Makino more than anyone. She wonders not for the first time what she’d looked like when they’d found her—what they’d seen, stepping through the door of that chapel.

She doesn’t have to wonder long, finding the answer in the way their eyes linger on her now, their glances stolen but telling, as though seeking to make sure—that she really is where she wants to be; that, for all of their captain’s bold claims and bravado, they didn’t steal her against her will.

Shanks’ smile is sheepish; it does a good job masking the lingering regret behind his eyes, but Makino still sees it—he lets her, and it sits between them still, the things that will take more than a wedding to heal. That long wound of a year she can still feel, if she looks for it.

But her forgiveness is defiant, and she’d spent so long not fighting, it feels like a relief now to do that—to decide that she will, despite everything.

Someone speaks up then, to add their thoughts on their captain’s fragile state of mind, the last leg of their voyage to Fuschia, and before Shanks can open his mouth to protest the cheerful mutiny, there are more voices chiming in, a story spun from a hundred different perspectives—

“He asked the navigator about the wind every three minutes—”

“Paced a hole in the foredeck—”

“I’m pretty sure he threw up more than once—”

“Nervous wreck ran at the mouth like he’d run out of words—”

“—and we thought Ben was going to throw him overboard if he didn’t shut up!”

Smiling, Makino hears them all—hoards every word, exchanging them with her own memories, of sitting behind the bar, the open bottle beside her, and the long walk down the aisle where she’d lost herself, piece by piece.

Shanks is shaking his head, a familiar mutter lamenting a wounded pride escaping under his breath, before the quirk of his lips prompts a hundred mirrored smiles, and their laughter. And it’s loud, a surge where it rises from the bottom of her stomach, filling her breast to bursting, but she hoards that, too, even as she has no room left within her. But she makes room for it, for all of them, greedy at the prospect of settling for anything less.

Glancing up, it’s to find Shanks looking at her, and as though having read the thoughts on her face, “What do you want?” he asks her, as though it’s that easy—as though all he has to do is ask, and all she has to do is answer.

Makino observes the smile, sitting with growing ease on his face—the one that’s right, with its scars and pronounced laugh-lines, the beard darkening his cheeks, his sharp nose. She traces the fall of his hair, curling at his jaw, the red limned with copper by the oil lamps, and allows herself to think about the things she hadn’t, earlier. He’ll be a good father, and she wants to know just how good, the pang of longing that lances through her so great it leaves her breathless.

“I want an island,” she tells him, and watches his brows lift. “On the edge of the world.” And then, because she can, because she’s a pirate and a pirate’s wife and she won’t deny herself anything anymore, “And I want children with your hair.”

The startled flash of his smile seizes her heart, it's so wide. And it’s nothing just anyone would ask of another person, a whole island and everything else the request implies—a life with him on it, and all the children she can give him—but from the adoring slant of his grin, it's not an impossible request.

His grip tightens around her ankle, his hand warm where it engulfs it, and she finds her answer in the smile that comes to settle in his eyes, easing away the last of the regret, even before he says, his voice a low murmur under the din of the crew that doesn't know how to be  _quiet_ —

“I should be able to manage at least one of those.” Then, with the tender quirk of his brows, his eyes twinkling, “although the second one might require a few attempts.”

Makino smiles, so happy she feels drunk from it, but there’s never been a kinder drowning as she considers it now, the future laid out before her, and the man in it—the sea, vast and wide open. Waiting for her, this time.

“I’m counting on it.”

 


End file.
